Shopping with Allah: Muslim pilgrimage, gender and consumption in a globalised world

By Viola Thimm

Shopping with Allah illustrates the ways in which religion is mobilised in package tourism and how spiritual, economic and gendered practices are combined in a form of tourism where the goal is not purely leisure but also ethical and spiritual cultivation.

Focusing on the intersection of gender and Islam, Viola Thimm shows how this intersection develops and changes in a pilgrimage-tourism nexus as part of capitalist and halal consumer markets. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, Thimm sheds light on how Islam and gender frame Malaysian religious tourism and pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula, but she raises many issues that are of great importance beyond these regional contexts.

This book also offers an innovative methodological-analytical toolkit to research mobility and intersectionality across socio-geographic scales ‘Scaling Holistic Intersectionality’. By bringing methodological holism into a fruitful engagement with the antiracist-feminist framework intersectionality, Thimm argues that hierarchical relationships, i.e. marginalisation, power and empowerment, can shift for an individual or a social group depending upon the social sphere.

Shopping with Allah will primarily be of interest to readers within the anthropology of gender, the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of religion more broadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800085619

Viola Thimm

Viola Thimm is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and Associate Professor of Anthropology (Privatdozentin) at the University of Heidelberg.

Book preview

Shopping with Allah

ECONOMIC EXPOSURES IN ASIA

Series Editor: Rebecca M. Empson, Department of Anthropology, UCL

Economic change in Asia often exceeds received models and expectations, leading to unexpected outcomes and experiences of rapid growth and sudden decline. This series seeks to capture this diversity. It places an emphasis on how people engage with volatility and flux as an omnipresent characteristic of life, and not necessarily as a passing phase. Shedding light on economic and political futures in the making, it also draws attention to the diverse ethical projects and strategies that flourish in such spaces of change.

The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that engage from a theoretical perspective with this new era of economic flux, exploring how current transformations come to shape and are being shaped by people in particular ways.

Shopping with Allah

Muslim pilgrimage, gender and consumption in a globalised world

Viola Thimm

First published in 2023 by

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800085589

For ‘Masjaliza’, my beloved Malay friend and sister.

Contents

List of figures

List of abbreviations

Acknowledgements

1Setting the ethnographic stage for gender, mobility and religious markets

2Malaysia – Islam, gender, economy

3Marketisation of pilgrimage

4Bodies in place, space and time

5Gendered devotion

6Spiritual shopping

7Conclusion

References

Index

List of figures

All photographs by Viola Thimm

1.1Female Malaysian umrah & ziarah travellers shopping for abayas in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2018.

1.2Studio in Dubai, where abayas are designed and sewn, United Arab Emirates, 2018.

1.3The Malaysian mutawif (religious tour guide) in the touring coach taking a picture from Burj al-Arab, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2018.

2.1A piggy bank (left) in the characteristic shape of Tabung Haji’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2017.

2.2Tabung Haji’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2014.

2.3Women studying at an umrah preparation course, Malaysia, 2017.

2.4The ‘Mesra Wuduk’ (intimate ritual washing) booth at Halfest, Serdang, Malaysia, 2017.

3.1Some travel agencies have their own hajj and umrah shops, contributing to the commercialisation of pilgrimage. Pilgrims can purchase specific items, such as tawaf socks, a spray bottle for wuduk (ritual washing) during travel, a nasal filter against the dust in Saudi Arabia, umrah guidebooks, or a whole set as in this shop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2017.

4.1Arab women wearing abayas in Dubai, UAE, 2014.

4.2Malaysian umrah & ziarah group interested in buying abayas (hanging above) in Dubai according to their taste, UAE, 2018.

4.3Purple painted house in Melaka. The tapestry shows the kaabah in the holy mosque in Mecca. Malaysia, 2017.

4.4Colourful Malay clothing for women on sale in a market in Tanah Merah, Malaysia, 2017.

5.1Malaysian umrah & ziarah pilgrims praying in the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi. Most of the standing women wear abayas, UAE, 2018.

6.1Ajwa dates from Medina, sold in Dubai during Ramadhan, UAE, 2018.

6.2Syariah-compliant abayas offered for sale at Souq Naif, Dubai, UAE, 2017.

List of abbreviations

Acknowledgements

My research interest in the religious and gender practices of Muslim Malays in Malaysia arose in the mid-2000s, when I had the opportunity to embark on an academic career as a doctoral student. I am now an associate professor and have, as a researcher, been able to return to Malaysia – and to its neighbouring country Singapore, my other main research site – on a fairly regular basis. Many of the acquaintances I made during my first long-term fieldwork in 2008–9 have become friends. Above all, I would like to thank my closest friend and ‘sister’ Masjaliza, whose real name I cannot disclose here for reasons of confidentiality. Without her, none of my research phases in Malaysia would have been as joyful, profound, inspiring and encouraging. She has always given me deep, often intimate, insights into her personal and family life and thereby shaped the direction of my research significantly. I dedicate this book to you, my beloved sister.

I also wish to thank Masjaliza’s family – ‘my Malaysian family’ as they constantly emphasise – who have generously shared their everyday routines, practices, thoughts, dreams, hopes and ideas with me. Masjaliza and her close family – her husband, her two children, Ibu and Bapak, Kakak and her family – have contributed so much to my research through their never-ending conversations with me, their trust and their warmth. Your experiences have tremendously enriched my understanding of Muslim and gender practices in countless ways. I am sure you will recognise your contributions when you come across them and I hope that you find them accurately represented.

Other respondents and friends, whose names must similarly remain hidden here, have worked equally hard to guide me through my ethnographic journey. I owe all of you my deepest gratitude for sharing your stories and everyday life practices with me. This is a debt that I can never hope to repay.

I am obliged to a large number of other people and institutions without whose assistance and support this book would not have been completed or published. Professor Guido Sprenger from the University of Heidelberg guided me generously through the qualification process for which this book was originally meant – my Habilitation as the German requirement for full professorship – and gave helpful and critical comments on the manuscript based on his careful, detailed reading. While Guido Sprenger was key at the point of completing this research, Professor Monika Arnez, who was then professor at Hamburg University, was key at the beginning. She supported me in developing my original research proposal, which was ultimately successful in attracting third-party funding. I owe both of you my deepest gratitude for sharing your knowledge and your experiences with me.

Other scholars with whom I have had valuable conversations at different stages of the research include Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, Adil Johan, Yeoh Seng Guan, Sharon A. Bong, Sumit Mandal, Alicia Izharuddin, Rima Sabban, Carla Jones, Marjo Buitelaar, Nimrod Luz, Sarah J. Mahler, Mayurakshi Chaudhuri, Daromir Rudnyckyj, Johan Fischer, Melanie Wood, Tim Bunnell, Frederike Steiner, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Claudia Derichs, Judith Schlehe, Volker Gottowik, Laila Prager, Christian Velde, Imke Moellering, Cathrine Bublatzky, Dominik Müller, Mirjam Lücking and Joan Henderson.

The research would not have been possible without institutional support from Monash Malaysia, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Malaysia, and from Zayed University, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, United Arab Emirates, during the fieldwork phases. Hosting me as a Visiting Research Fellow in both cases, the two institutions provided well-organised, inspiring and warm working environments. I especially thank Sharon A. Bong and Eswary Sivalingam from Monash Malaysia as well as Rima Sabban and Aalia AlFalasi from Zayed University for making this possible.

This book rests on research conducted with generous financial support from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG), the Olympia Morata Programme in support of young female professors, and the ‘Nachwuchsinitiative Universität Hamburg’ (Initiative for young scholars). I would like to express my gratitude to those bodies. Without the funding and the time this allowed for concentration on research, the writing of this book would not have been possible.

I am also indebted to the editor of the Economic Exposures in Asia series at UCL Press, Rebecca M. Empson, and to commissioning editor for Anthropology, Chris Penfold, who organised a smooth and constructive publication process throughout. I furthermore express my thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who showed enthusiasm for this book from the outset, with their extremely positive evaluations and assessments of my manuscript.

My deepest thanks also go to my partner Harald. Without you, not only my research but also my life as an academic would not have been possible. After we had been spatially separated for a year by my field research in Southeast Asia in the course of my dissertation research from 2008 to 2009, we, and especially he, put all our energy into implementing joint field research in Malaysia and on the Arabian Peninsula from 2017 to 2018. The priority was to continue our beautiful life together and to develop myself and my career. Harald organised a one-year sabbatical in order to follow me on ethnographic fieldwork from the beginning to the end. As you know, Harry, many aha-moments and findings of this research are based on joint discussions with you in the field. Apart from the intellectual journey with you, your emotional and mental support have been essential for my path.

1

Setting the ethnographic stage for gender, mobility and religious markets

In my fourteenth month of ethnographic fieldwork, in April 2018, I followed my ninth Malaysian pilgrimage group in Dubai, the bustling city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and in Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s smaller, calmer capital. Thirty-four pilgrims, including two children, one mutawif¹ (a religious tour guide from Malaysia), one Pakistani tour leader and one cultural anthropologist from Germany, spent a four-day tour together. At the very beginning of the first day, Jamil,² the Pakistani tour guide, announced over the tour bus microphone that the ladies of the group, who – according to him – would certainly want to get abayas (long, usually black coats or dresses), would be able to shop for them the next day when the group visited the souq (market) area of Dubai. He mentioned to me that one of the Malaysian pilgrims had asked him about shopping for abayas soon after her arrival at the airport. Hawa, the lady he was talking about, was undertaking her first pilgrimage journey, which incorporated this stopover in the UAE. She later told me that shopping for abayas was one of the main reasons for making a stopover in Dubai and not in any other place. While her main focus was on the performance of umrah (lesser pilgrimage) in Mecca, in today’s Saudi Arabia, she had planned the whole journey according to her fashion taste as well.

Why is the abaya so important for Hawa? Why is it a ‘must’ that she gets an abaya in Dubai and not from anywhere else? How does she combine the shopping part with the spiritual pilgrimage journey?

Both Dubai and the Holy Land in Saudi Arabia are hotspots for buying abayas. Nine months earlier, while sitting with Farrah and her youngest daughter Murni at a local food stall in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia’s capital city, Farrah had told me about her abayas. Her first abaya was a gift from her mother-in-law, who gave it to her on her return from pilgrimage to Mecca. She had thought, disparagingly, ‘Oh, it’s so black!’, and she had felt uncomfortable because she imagined everyone would be able to see her body shape when wearing it. But later, when she went to Mecca herself, she discovered the way Arab women wear it. They wear jeans underneath, for example; they just throw the abaya over the top, and with that one move they are properly attired. She said that these days she has lots of abayas, which she wears for dinner or for prayer.

How does Farrah connect this garment with her communication to God, and how does she connect it to social events? Why is the style of wearing it of interest to her? Why do female family members bring abayas back to Malaysia from their pilgrimage trips and turn them into gifts?

A connection between the garment and the religious faith of my respondents exists; a certain type of abaya is saturated with religion. A month after my meal with Farrah and Murni, I met with 40-year-old³ Sofea, an abaya designer and retailer from KL, in the glamorous shopping mall Suria KLCC, directly beneath the Petronas Twin Towers – the symbol of Malaysia’s modern Islam, as I have often been told. Her philosophy regarding the abaya was that they as Muslims must be modest, since Allah is always watching them. This means not wearing anything too extravagant or vibrant. She explained that Dolce & Gabbana also make abayas – but they are not supposed to wear them, only the modest ones. Sofea said that she is close to Allah when she is modest, and that this is how the abaya influences her relationship with God. She remembers Him⁴ when she chooses to wear something loose and modest rather than showy or shiny.

The points made by Hawa, Farrah and Sofea – the importance of buying a particular garment, the abaya, on the pilgrimage journey, either in Mecca or Dubai, and bringing it back home to Malaysia as a gift or for oneself; of wearing it on certain occasions and in a manner that abides by Islamic rules; and of understanding it as a means of surrendering to God – represent a small portion of the broader themes of this study: self-representation and identification, gender norms and roles, spirituality, material culture, consumption and mobility. And they all lead to the central topic of Shopping with Allah: the intersection of gender and faith/spirituality, focusing in particular on one significant world religion: Islam. This study investigates, in a broad sense, how this intersection develops and changes in a pilgrimage-tourism nexus as part of capitalist and halal consumer markets. It shows the ways in which religion is mobilised in package tourism and how spiritual, economic and gendered practices combine in a form of tourism where the goal is not purely leisure, but also ethical and spiritual cultivation. In a concrete sense, it examines how gendered and spiritual social practices and inner dispositions accrue, perpetuate and transform through Muslim pilgrimage⁵ and tourism in the regional context of Malaysia and the UAE, especially Dubai. In this respect, the book sheds light on how Islam and gender frame Malaysian religious tourism and pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula – though it raises many further issues that are of great importance beyond these regional contexts.

This study will show that, and how, female pilgrims negotiate their identification as modern, pious Muslim women on the basis of feminised practices of shopping in Dubai (see figure 1.1), Mecca and Medina and the appropriation, integration and adaption of gendered objects purchased into their life in Malaysia. The most obvious such object that female Malaysians such as Hawa, Farrah and Sofea appropriate is the abaya – the long, traditionally black dress worn especially by Arab women, which they associate with ‘religiosity’, ‘modernity’ and, partially, ‘sexiness’. By bringing the religiously connoted abaya into everyday life in Malaysia and, thereby, into both private and public spaces, females⁶ make their spirituality visible and thereby mark their active role in religious negotiation processes. In terms of an abaya being fashionable, modern or sexy, females express to the outside world in local and transregional contested religious constellations that they are protagonists of a modern Islam in Malaysia.

While female pilgrims embody their spiritual status by wearing an abaya in social private and public spaces, they also use this and other gendered clothing elements as a means of representing changing family constellations: when a wife transforms her relationship with her husband in parallel with her deeper relationship with Allah on the basis of a pilgrimage experience. These manifold constellations show how Malay Malaysian women and men involve themselves and are involved differently in reciprocally constitutive identifications, categories and practices of embodied gender and faith/spirituality regarding their privilege and marginalisation on various social scales.

Figure 1.1 Female Malaysian umrah & ziarah travellers shopping for abayas in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2018.

The entangled perspectives, practices and identifications of the research subjects are explored in their intricacy. The intersectional approach has evolved as a framework to understand identities as reciprocally interrelated. Based on the intersection between gender and faith/spirituality under examination, I will make one main theoretical argument. I reconfigure both previous anthropological and intersectionality scholarship by arguing the following: gendered spirituality leads to different, mutually constitutive, gendered and religionised embodied practices of this inner disposition and of femininity or masculinity which eventually challenge gendered social hierarchical orders. In this regard, it will be argued that the spiritual relationship to the Islamic past is only possible in its fullness for males, which they express though their attire. Muslim women have a lower religious status position here (see chapter 4). Furthermore, spiritual communication with God is constituted differently by females and males: whereas males can pray to God in whatever garments they are wearing at the time, females are required to modify their bodies beforehand and thereby face specific religious restrictions (see chapter 5). Moreover, wives embody spirituality in matrimony through their garments and simultaneously reproduce submission and liberation. Men as husbands and fathers, however, express their spirituality on the level of social actions and thereby reconfigure their gendered status position, which eventually relieves their wives of parental duties (see chapter 5). Additionally, purchasing specific attire on the pilgrimage journey has developed from a gender-neutral activity to a female consumer and spiritual gift-giving experience that potentially empowers women and girls (see chapter 6).

It will be shown that the abaya, as the most obvious garment in all these circumstances, is itself an intersectional garment. It is the material surface where intersectionality, i.e. mutually dependent processes of gender and faith/spirituality, becomes visible. Beneath this socio-material dimension lie socio-cultural relationships, such as sacred landscaping, exchange relations, kinship and gender ideologies. This book investigates how gendered meanings and practices of spirituality and faith are redefined or reified in the process of religious travel and practices of consumption, and thereby inform wider interdisciplinary debates about intersectionality, constructions of identity, mobility and religious material culture in a globalised world.

Studying pilgrimage

The object of investigation is contemporary pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, with a stopover in Dubai (‘umrah & ziarah Dubai’), undertaken by Sunni Malay Malaysians. Umrah and ziarah are two of three forms of Muslim pilgrimage. The third form is the hajj – the most important form of pilgrimage – which umrah and (partly) ziarah are derived from, aligned with and measured against. The hajj is the fifth pillar of Sunni Islam and one of the obligatory practices of Shia Islam’s Ancillaries of the Faith. Therefore, the hajj is compulsory for every Muslim, as long as she or he can physically and financially undertake the journey. This pilgrimage comprises determined rituals in Mecca, including circumambulating the black cube (kaabah), throwing pebbles and praying at Mount Arafat (see chapter 2 for details).

In contrast to the hajj, it is not compulsory (wajib) to perform umrah. Whereas the timeframe for the hajj is limited to five specific days a year, umrah can be performed at any time in a period of seven months. While the hajj lasts five days, umrah can be completed within a single day, as the rituals outside Mecca are not usually performed. Ziarah derives from the Arabian term for ‘visit’. In the Malay language it can mean any form of visit, without spiritual connotation, but when it is used in connection with umrah, in Malaysia it is certainly understood as a religious practice (see chapter 3). Ziarah is an act of piety, practised in order to receive God’s blessing (barakah) in contemporary life as well as on the day of judgment (Jamhari 2001, 1999).

The term ‘pilgrimage’ derives from Christian contexts and has no linguistic equivalent in the Malay (Bahasa Melayu) or Arabic languages. When my respondents talk in English about this phenomenon, they indeed use the term ‘pilgrimage’, but this remains an approximation they choose to use as a result of their exposure to English and hence of their habituation to the ways of expressing oneself in this foreign language. In Bahasa Melayu the expressions mengerjakan haji (to perform hajj) and mengerjakan umrah (to perform umrah) exist. The verb mengerjakan is commonly used for expressions related to Islamic worship when these acts of worship are regarded either as wajib (something Muslims must do) or as sunat (something that is recommended/preferred for Muslims to do). There is no Malay equivalent for the word ‘pilgrim(s)’; it is expressed as jemaah haj (pilgrims performing hajj) or jemaah umrah (pilgrims performing umrah). Jemaah is used in the Malay language for people doing an ibadah (religious obligation; act of worship). Notably, neither the expression mengerjakan ziarah nor jemaah ziarah exists in Bahasa Melayu.

This leads to the observation that in Malaysia, only hajj and umrah are understood as ‘pilgrimage’ – ziarah is, from an emic perspective, explicitly excluded from this concept and practice. Yet in regional Muslim contexts other than Malaysia, such as Indonesia,⁷ Turkey and Iran, ziarah certainly denotes a common form of pilgrimage (Jamhari 2001, 2000; Millie and Mayo 2019; Mohd Faizal 2013; Moufahim 2013; Prager 2013) and thus frames wider debates on pilgrimage in this research. It is mainly understood as visiting the graves of prophets or saints, which does not necessarily lead to the Arabian Peninsula but implies a visit to the shrines or graves of local saints (wali) (Jamhari 1999; Surinder 1998). The idea of ‘pilgrimage’ is not used for this activity by my respondents, nor do most Muslim Malays ziarah (i.e. visit)⁸ such graves, as I have shown elsewhere (Thimm 2017).

However, I include the concept and practice of ziarah in this research on Muslim pilgrimage as it fulfils certain criteria my respondents apply to (their understanding of) pilgrimage. According to the Malay Malaysians in this study, these are: (1) dependence on place (it must be performed in Mecca) (see Luz 2020); (2) being bound to the spiritual moment; and (3) getting a sense for the ummah and for the Islamic past. Adopting these three emic criteria to more general practices of religious visits, ziarah can be included in an analytical understanding of Muslim pilgrimage alongside hajj and umrah. According to the three emic aspects of pilgrimage and embracing the scholarship on ziarah in other Muslim contexts, therefore, my etic viewpoint defines Muslim pilgrimage as reliant on the following: (1) particular places (Mecca, Medina) – but tombs/shrines of prophets or Islamic scholars or saints also count; (2) spiritual embeddedness by transforming one’s inner disposition towards God – or connecting oneself and/or a dead person to God and to the afterlife (akhirat); and (3) a connection to the Islamic past in general, which can be achieved by commemorating particular places or figures – for example by visiting the tombs of Muslims who shaped Islamic interpretation and practice in the past and who pilgrims thus feel attached to.

Bringing Islam, gender and consumption to the fore

Based in feminist gender and intersectionality studies, this ethnography investigates the mutually influencing gendered, spiritual and religious identifications and differentiations that Malay Malaysian social actors negotiate in the framework of social, political, economic and religious dynamics. Malaysia is a multicultural society where 69.3 per cent of its citizens are classified as Bumiputera (Malays and native people, such as Orang Asli or Kadazandusun), 22.8 per cent of Chinese ancestry and 6.9 per cent of Indian ancestry (Department of Statistics, Malaysia 2019). According to the Malaysian Constitution, affirmative action is given in favour of Malays (article 153 [1]‌), but with certain limitations. Furthermore, the Constitution stipulates Sunni Islam with the Shafi’i school (mazhab) of jurisprudence (fiqh) as the religion of the state and as the compulsory religion for all Malays (article 3 [1]; article 160). So we see that Islam was established with special protection as the religion for the majority society, and this has been retained by the government today. Politicised Islam in Malaysia in particular and the socio-historical and political context in general are informed by global capitalist economies and its linkages to the halal industry.

The entanglements between gender, Islam and consumption are examined in this book by focusing on the perspectives of social actors. Malay Malaysian pilgrims consume religious connoted travel packages, and women in particular shop for (partly) spiritual, gender-specific souvenirs on the trip. Consumption on the religious journey becomes highly gendered. The social actors draw on the commercialisation of spirituality, driven by local and global tourism and fashion industries specialising in Muslim(ah)⁸-related products (see figure 1.2). These connections motivated my choice of Dubai as part of the pilgrimage study: the ziarah stopover in Dubai represents a grey area. On the one hand, Malaysian pilgrims consider Dubai to be an Arab and Islamic place; on the other, they see it as a modern shopping paradise. The entanglement between concepts of tourism and pilgrimage can only be observed when it comes to integrating Dubai into pilgrimage – in contrast, a ziarah stopover in Istanbul or Jerusalem is considered to be ‘pure ziarah’, as totally related to Islamic history, and a transit in London or Switzerland as ‘holiday only’. Given the gendered character of the ‘umrah & ziarah Dubai’ journey and its spiritual and consumerist dimensions, this form of travel naturally suggested itself as the object of investigation, even though it is not quantitatively dominant in the Malaysian context.

Figure 1.2 Studio in Dubai, where abayas are designed and sewn, United Arab Emirates, 2018.

Three central questions guided this research: (1) How far do Muslim forms of travel have an impact on gendered identifications and practices, and vice versa? (2) How do the consumption and distribution of objects and goods relate to religious concepts and practices and how is this relationship, in turn, connected to the category and practices of gender? (3) What meanings do female and male Muslim actors assign to the consumer goods they acquire in Dubai, Mecca and Medina and how is this meaning related to gendered and religious normative orders, discourses and social practices in Malaysia and its transregional connectivities to the Arabian Peninsula?

Consumption forms the context of this study, since it refers to broader processes of Islamisation and modernisation in Malaysia – and beyond – in which visibility is practised differently according to gender. As women are the driving force when it comes to visibly expressed transformations of gender roles, femininity and spirituality, females are thus the focus of this study. I want to clarify that in this study I am dealing with heterosexual relationships between women and men, and thereby exclude other gendered identifications (such as LGBTQI+). This is on the grounds that my respondents framed their life-images based on heteronormative conditions. The gendered notion of this study, therefore, is investigated in the sense of negotiating belonging, identification and relationships between women and men based on their respective identifications as women or men within the socio-political, cultural, economic and historical conditions in which they live. Giving priority to the emic perspective does not mean that I follow it analytically, i.e. I do not understand gender in an essentialised way of gender binarity and as exclusive relations between women and men, as the majority of my interlocutors do.

Gender and religion: mutually constitutive identifications

This study follows an approach which understands gender and Islam as identifications and cultural practices that are mutually constitutive. Whilst academic research to date has broadly dealt with either reciprocally constitutive identifications, such as gender, race, class and sexuality, or gendered perspectives of Muslim women, a systematic examination of gender-faith intersections is still needed. This is especially important when considering research on Muslim pilgrimage. This study will therefore contribute to three research areas. First, to anthropology, by bringing gender and faith understood as mutually constitutive intersections from a power-critical standpoint into anthropology. Second, to scholarship, dealing with intersectionality – which lacks investigations into relations between gender and the Muslim religion. Third, to research on Muslim pilgrimage, which has been neglecting gender, not to mention gender in its interrelationship with other identifications.

‘Identifications’ are personal and collective senses of belonging which are culturally constituted and embedded in socio-political and historical conditions; they are not something that is naturally given (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). I understand identifications (for example gendered, religious, ethnic, national, sexual, classed) as categories of difference, as part of human classification systems, as social processes which emphasise a subject’s agency and various contextual dependencies, and as structures, in the sense of power structures, which whilst not static are still difficult to overcome. This means understanding gender and religion as systems within cultural settings which can relate to identity, social relationships, social practices and/or power (see Höpflinger et al. 2012).

In my theoretical understanding of gender, I follow a constructivist approach that acknowledges the lived and material body. Whereas some scholars regard constructivism and the material body as a contradiction (for example Butler 1993, 1990; Duden 2002, 1993, 1991; Landweer 1994; Lindemann 1993), this study brings the two approaches together (see Qvotrup Jensen and Elg 2010) and thereby follows the affective turn. According to Butler, the body is a ‘surface of matter’ (Butler 1993: 9) which is imposed by gender. She draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of social subjects which are constantly exposed to (self-)disciplinary acts through discursively produced knowledge (see Foucault 2009a [1978], 2009b [1979], 2008, 1994, 1977). Foucault focuses on connections between body and knowledge by investigating technologies of power, control, registration and suppression of the body, especially in contexts of judicial punishment and medical inspection. He points out in his studies how bodies are made materially productive by powerful forces and that the body and sexuality are, by implication, formed by discourses rather than biology. This poststructuralist approach is directly related to structuralist approaches which pinpoint the human body as a site of materialisation of power. In this regard, Pierre Bourdieu (2010 [1979]), who owes much to structuralism, examines class-related self-formation in, on and through the body with his concept of the habitus. Bodies are structured and constituted through disciplining acts of power which are incorporated by constant bodily practices. These incorporated structures of power must, at the same time, be applied by the social subjects again and again. By drawing particularly on Foucault’s research, Butler argues that processes of embodiment of gender refer to the fact that negotiations of gendered identities are normalising and (self-)disciplining acts. She states that gendered and sexual identifications are continuously discursively (re-)produced and controlled within a patrilinear heteronormative system. Hence, Butler does not investigate the category of gender but the process of categorisation itself.

While Butler explores the conditions of materialising the body, she does not explain how the constituted materiality is realised for the subject – that is, how the subject feels, senses and experiences their own body. This phenomenological void has crucial ramifications for my analytical approaches to gender. Butler’s radical constructivism has been criticised, especially in German feminist thought, by bringing in the distinction between the discursively constituted body and the lived, experienced body. This is expressed with Körper and Leib respectively and refers to the condition that humans are a Leib (an experienced body with uncontrollable conditions) and have a Körper (a socio-culturally constructed body which one can access as an object).

Scholars such as Birgit Schaufler (2002), Barbara Duden (2002, 1993, 1991) and Gesa Lindemann (1993) emphasise direct, lived bodily experiences by focusing on processes and conditions – contrary to Butler – under the surface. Moreover, this feminist strand of research investigates rituals, gestures, gazes and words as bodily acts which are directly connected to processes of subjectification.

The practice of merging the socio-culturally constructed and the experiencing body stems from the fact that social constructivism cannot adequately explain the stability of the reproduction of gender identification and difference. It lacks explanations of the bodily-affective attachment of individuals to their gender (see Lindemann 1993). Thus, people not only perform gender but furthermore feel their gender. For example, certain body parts such as breasts or vagina structure how the body is experienced in terms of gender, as these parts are experienced as gender-relevant. The socially constructed dichotomy of gender is thus incorporated (einverleibt) and internalised, so that people are a gender, namely the gender that the body (Körper) signifies.

Alongside gender, religion is the other main category and practice that I focus on in this research. However, I draw more on religious faith and spirituality as theoretical concepts than on religion (see Francis 2016; Schielke 2010; van Liere 2017). ‘Religion’ in its common present yet narrow sense has been developed as a concept in Europe characterised by Christianity, in the context of a differentiation between religious and secular realms of life. During the Enlightenment, religion as a metaphysical sphere was separated from rational thought (Rehbein and Sprenger 2016; Tayob 2018). Based on this socio-cultural and historical development, ‘religion’ refers in the common – particularly – Western notion, particularly in Abrahamic traditions, to a relationship between a human and (a) divine being(s). On the level of social processes, this understanding is related in particular to institutions and institutional power. Within this context, religion evolves as an analytical category – it is understood as ‘something’ that can be systematised as a social realm with (clear) boundaries. In Western ways of thinking, this marks a condition for the secular–religious divide (van Liere 2017: 289).

This ‘something’ alone raises the question for academics (and the general public alike) of how to define or grasp it. From an anthropological perspective, by contrast, the more important question is how people act within these systems of power, how they interpret corresponding books and goods, and how they worship and submit to their God(s). In relation specifically to Islam, one of the most influential works which tries not to regard Islam as a ‘thing’ but as a negotiable contextualised set of meaning-making is Talal Asad’s (1986) notion of Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’. This has been the guiding principle in the anthropology of Islam for the last 30+ years. Asad approaches Islam as ‘simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present’ (Asad 1986: 14). This tradition of discourse is based on the Qur’an (the holy book of Islam) and the Hadith (the record of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohamad), which is constantly debated by Islamic authorities in terms of the correctness of Islamic principles and practices.

Samuli Schielke (2010) notes that Asad still tries to define Islam and thereby walks away from his own goal of embedding his theoretical approach into social life. What other people consider to be Islam, he points out,